Over the Past month or so I have found the fastest production chips for your home computer. The AMD Quad core Phenom 9xxx ssries and the Budget 3 core 8xxx series

A motherboard to Match their Performance
www.morecomputers.com/extra.asp?pn=M3N%2DH%2FHDMI from about 55 Pounds($110)

Also Fast Memory(DDR3) to suit Needs about 2GB Minimum

And It can be run with a 550 watt PSU (and performance will be Poor) Really needs a 1000+ watts unit to start the fireworks ( and they are approaching $200)

Cannot Cut corners on something like this

Oh I forgot needs a Minimum GeForce 9xxx series Graphic card to Give adequate Graphics
Hold on a second, the 9xxx Cards are the Best!?
Maybe, but Nvidia Have an ace up their Sleeve .In fact they have 2!

The other week they announced they had released an "all new" Graphics card range to Make the 8 and 9xxx cards look like toys and Boy, they were not Wrong! (I'd love to see a British benchmark test on these compared to the 9K series Flagship)
They have a modest Name Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 Series As I understand it the "X" in the name =10 as in the Roman X .Bit of a mouthful saying GT10280 (so thats a good way of doing things)
And the 2 models (so far) are the GTX 280 OC & GTX 260 The 280 is on sale Now and the 260 is following at the end of June

I'll let the Specs speak for themselves on the Links but these units are fatter and longer Like a video cassette case and you can squash only 3 on the 4 slot board and 2 on the 3 BUT....Why? Just 1 card is more than most average users need Ever ... The Facts are the GPU chip is almost a full fledged CPU with multi cores Clock speed 600 MHZ! DDR 3 RAM how about 896 MB Memory and 1 GB for the Top end model! and They Need to be connected to the Power supply with 2 leads not 1 as is the Norm

On 1 preview test Stateside the Game Geeks complained about not getting the Frame rate on 1 game and the older board was better.But that was a prelaunch review and Nvida are adding some more tweak tools and tricks soon. So if it's fast at the official Launch ? What will it motor like once the Basic Tweak updates have been added?
Full details here .Head to Head test against the 9800 series http://tinyurl.com/6kxhu3

www.pcworld.com/article/id,147112-c,graphicschips/article.html

And the UK Prices for the GTX280/260 ? Saying nothing bar look at this, http://tinyurl.com/5z8s98 and make a "" face! Double the Numbers for the same in Dollars

Bottom line is this setup really is for the People that will be running the 64 bit Windows 7 Operating System and Very High resolution Monitors, The Faster network Speeds too
I'd say its good for 2020 at least when even Windows 7 will be 2 or 3 generations old and they'll be 128 bit machines or something else entirely?

The 32 bit models will be catered for a few years yet with OS changes. Even Windows 7 will run happily on it